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Image of the Saints
| Article
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20232 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
1,814 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
The pilgrimage across northern Spain to the sanctuary of St. James at Santiago de Compostela in the province of Galicia is known as the finest journey in Spain and one of the two or three best in the world. And so it has been for nearly a thousand years. Along with Jerusalem, where Christ was crucified, and Rome, where Peter founded the church, Santiago de Compostela, from which point Europe had been evangelized by James, was one of the three physical locations upon which the imagery of the church depended.
The Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, was one of the most heavily traveled routes during the Middle Ages. More than half a million people moved along the road each year. Among them were devout Christians who sought salvation at the tomb of the saint, knights (accompanied by their ladies) who had vowed in battle to visit the shrine if they returned home safely, officials of the church--monks, priests, and cardinals--who saw the journey as an exceptional achievement of their spiritual lives, and criminals sentenced to "five years in jail or pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint James, whichever."
The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela is still made by thousands each year. In the summers of 1988 and 1989, Santa Fe photographer Joan Myers traveled along the Way of St. James, taking pictures that commune with the route's present and past, images that yield the wisdom that with this particular pilgrimage it is the journey itself and what the pilgrim brings to it, rather than the destination, that is most important. These photographs--as well as those taken on subsequent trips through the Caribbean, Mexico, and New Mexico--form the nationally touring exhibition Santiago, Saint of Two Worlds, which opened in January 1992 at the Albuquerque Museum of Art.
Myers says her projects usually just happen to her. "Ill go by a place, feel a pull to the feeling exuded by it, begin to do research, and before I know it, I'm committed to a couple of years of travel." Her interest in the road to Santiago de Compostela took a slightly different shape. After reading a personal pilgrimage account in Grand Street in the spring of 1988 she mentioned her curiosity about the pilgrimage route to Terry Pitts, director of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Planning to visit Spain himself, he subsequently sent her a copy of a modern guidebook to the pilgrimage route and information on travel grants, advising her to become a part of the exchange of scholars between Spain and the United States that would precede the 1992 quincentenary celebration of Columbus' exploration of the New
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